


while all about it reel shadows

by hinotorihime



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Disordered Eating, Everyone is miserable, Gen, Grief, Hurt No Comfort, Unfinished Fragment, for every 'grief is weird and families are complicated' fic i've written for this fandom, i wrote this ages ago so it's probably slightly to the left of canon, i'd have 15 cents, if i had a nickel, this is barely 1k and i still managed to do a worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:47:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23196535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hinotorihime/pseuds/hinotorihime
Summary: Saira has always hated summer.  In winter the heat is soft, and the river is high, and the jackals retreat back into the desert, into the tombs where they belong. In winter the earth doesn’tcrack, the sirocco doesn’t blow sand into her eyes until they’re red and wet with more than just exhaustion, the dull weariness of old grief and too little sleep.(or: a snippet of the resistance!Saira fic that might have been.)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	while all about it reel shadows

**Author's Note:**

> i was looking through some of my old untitled google docs and stumbled on something i started writing during last summer's season break. it was, i remembered, going to be a melancholy look at one full day in post-apocalypse cairo, from the perspectives of saira and ismail, triggered by the realization that _oh my god over half of the tahan children are gone now how are the shattered remnants of this family **coping**?_  
> (the answer, it turns out, is "pretty badly". it's just that the fractures are all in different places.)  
> i think i also wanted badass resistance saira and budding healer ismail, but in the end that part never got written. so we're left with this-- a fragment of something i don't think i'll ever revisit, but wanted to share anyway.

Ismail is already gone when Saira gets up— boots vanished from under the bed, the pink token left on the side table that means he’s helping at Aphrodite’s temple today. Saira yawns as she shoves her own boots on and sleepily fumbles for the bell to call a maid.

Rashida bustles in to draw the curtains and fish Saira’s clothes out of the haphazard pile Ismail keeps leaving at the bottom of her wardrobe while Saira finishes the cursed buttons on her boots. Finally, she stands up and holds her arms out for the first layer of underclothes.

“Has my mother had breakfast yet?” she asks. Rashida, sorting out corset strings, makes a face in the mirror.

“It was... brought up to her,” she says. Saira bites her lip and turns her head to the window.

It’s a dry day: dusty, red, the sky harsh blinding blue. Even inside the air is already starting to make her throat scratchy.

(Saira has always hated summer. In winter the heat is soft, and the river is high, and the jackals retreat back into the desert, into the tombs where they belong. In winter the earth doesn’t _crack_ , the sirocco doesn’t blow sand into her eyes until they’re red and wet with more than just exhaustion, the dull weariness of old grief and too little sleep.)

“Busy day, miss?” asks Rashida. The dove-grey linen of the overdress is suddenly crackling around Saira’s shoulders. She blinks.

“As always. Please have my breakfast sent to my mother’s room.”

Rashida nods wordlessly and finishes smoothing the skirts out. Saira lays her own token down on the table: pale green. _I’m taking care of things from home today. Come find me when you get back._

She steps quickly, quietly out into the corridor, heading for Aziza’s room to say good morning to her siblings.

She knows she’s long since missed morning prayer, but Ismail has obviously been here already, because the bowls of salt and bread on the two altars they’d had to move in from the atrium are full and fresh. It’s dark and cool. She lights a candle and bows perfunctorily to the god-shrine, then turns to the opposite side.

Aziza laughs back at her from the top, ringed with flowers, eyes bright and mischievous and full of life. Saira meets them defiantly. It’s become easier over the last two years.

It hasn’t, with the other two. Maybe that’s because it hasn’t even been a full year since they finally gave in and put the portraits up.

“He’s not dead!” Ismail insisted. “I’d know! I know h—he isn’t dead, I can tell!” 

Their mother just kept looking at them blankly, and Saira didn’t say any of the many other things she was thinking, not to her mother, not to her brother; she just wrestled him into a rough hug and said with her voice cracking bitterly, “Mom’s right. It doesn’t matter if they’re— if they’re both dead or not. They’re _gone_ . The time dilation was only supposed to be by weeks. Something happened to them. If they were able to come back—they’d be here by now.” 

—And now she kneels under the portraits like she does every morning and night and forces herself to look at them. It’s still hard, so hard. It hasn’t been long enough at all. Feels like it won’t ever be long enough. 

(Or maybe it’s because the last time she heard Hamid’s voice he was panicking, crackly over a magical sending, telling her to stay put, that he would find out what had happened, that he was going to go put things to rights. (Maybe it’s because she still doesn’t believe her own words— there’s a part of her that still, desperately, greedily, wants him to have been right for once, that wants to cling to Albert Einstein and beg for hope the way Ismail does.) 

Maybe it’s because the last time she saw Ishaak she’d been yelling at him about ruining the table— had banished him to the garden where he wouldn’t destroy anything that wouldn’t grow back. Where no one could see him, in the shadows of the courtyard. Where no one could reach him in time.) 

Hamid’s portrait is an old one, from just before he left for university. He looks cocky and excited, but underneath there’s a little nervousness. Saira remembers that. He hid it so well, but she knows how to read her little brother. 

Knew. 

They’d had to do some clever cutting and arranging, for Ishaak’s. They didn’t have any portraits of just him.

At least Saleh’s portrait, Father’s portrait, aren’t there. They’re safe enough—safer than her, probably. She gets letters from them sometimes. Father’s are cursory and vague; Saleh’s are rambling and full of apologies. Saira— rarely writes much in response. What is there to say anyway? Dear Saleh, the world is still shit. We’re trying to fix it but I’m terrified it might be too late. Dear Father, I wish you were here. You’d know what to do. I don’t know what I’m doing. Dear Saleh, sometimes I think you’re lucky, not having to deal with any of this. Dear Father, I’m trying to take care of us like you always tried to do. But I’m not brave like you or Zizu or Hamid.

(Dear Father: you idiot. Why did you pick this way? Why didn’t you just let Saleh sort himself out without getting involved and making us lose you too? Why have you left me to carry all of this on my own?  
I’m not Hamid or Aziza. I’m not even Mother. I’m a fucking _accountant_. You’re a short-sighted fool and I miss you, and I don’t know how long I can hold things together.) 

(—so no. Saira doesn’t write much to her father.)

Mother is sitting by the window again, picking absently at her skirt, but at least she’s out of bed.

“Morning, Mum,” says Saira. “Did you sleep?”

Mother doesn’t look at her. “No,” she confesses. Saira picks up both breakfast trays— one still steaming, one untouched and cold.

“Do you want me to send this back down to be heated up?” she asks gently.

Mother shakes her head. “I have no appetite today,” she says.

“You know you still need to eat.”

“If I force myself I’ll only make myself sick.”

“You haven’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday, Mum,” says Saira. “At least some bread. Please.”

“I _can’t_.”

“ _Mum_.”

“Leave it, Saira!” says Mother sharply. “I’m not a child in need of coddling!”

“You’re _ill_.”

Mother sets her lips mulishly. Saira holds her own tray out without a word. They sit like that for almost a minute. A frozen, miserable tableau.

Finally, Mother’s shoulders stiffen up and one-handed she carefully breaks off a corner of the piece of toast.

“You’re a disobedient and horribly cruel child,” she says, with a tiny hint of her old humor tingeing her voice.

Saira hugs her.

“I’m proud of you.”

“Hm,” says Mother.

“Are you... coming downstairs today?”

“I think I’ll sleep some more. I’m so _tired_ , Riri.”

Saira hugs her tighter.

It turns out that there’s a lot of work involved in running a refugee resettlement camp out of your garden, and that work mostly boils down to shouting at the right people to keep your supply lines open and semi-functional. Saira is well-trained in people-wrangling, and she’s glad to feel that she’s doing something useful. She still sighs a little when she sees the stack of invoices on her desk. It takes until lunch to get through them, because she has to make sure a summary of the contents is recorded in triplicate before she files each document away. One copy for her own records. One copy as backup for the Meritocratic offices in Cairo. And one copy, ciphered, to be hidden by the Harlequins. A failsafe, if Cairo falls.

(There are plenty of people who hate the documentation system she’s forced the resistance to implement, and she knows even the leaders don’t really think it’s necessary. But Saira knows it is, and frankly, after a lifetime of living with Aziza, she has neither fear nor patience left for Maria Curie.)

(When all of this is over, Saira has promised herself, however it ends; there will be no one lost track of, no one forgotten. No errata: _death date unknown, gravesite unknown, family unnotified_.)


End file.
